Insurance Product Design: How It works

The expectations for a pleasant user experience are increasing daily as the demands of the modern digital society grow. Consumers got used to Netflix, Amazon, and Booking.com's high bar of services. Other businesses—for instance, insurance companies—have to catch up and evolve toward a more seamless customer experience with tailored options. 

As a professional product agency with over 130 completed projects in UI/UX design, branding, and product strategy, the Arounda team leverages innovations in many industries. In this article, we discuss how to design an insurance product and explain five crucial points of product development. 

1. Define the Target Audience

A target audience is a group of consumers with specific demographic characteristics such as age, gender, location, employment, income, interests, etc. For example, you might aim for a man between 25 and 35 who owns a small business in Canada and needs comprehensive insurance coverage for workers’ compensation, multiple liability coverages, and commercial property. Or maybe you are in health insurance product design for a senior, moderately overweight housewife.  

The target audience is your compass which defines most business decisions. To spend money on ads or focus on native SMM? Which communication channel to use? What pricing strategy will work best? 

If you don’t yet have a clear vision of the buyer, take your time to study their life and behaviors:

• use Google Analytics to find out more about your clients.
• look at your social media analytical charts
• observe social media audiences 
• get in touch with relevant Facebook communities 
• check who is visiting your website 

You can use several marketing instruments to transform a mash of your insights into a realistic portrait of your target user. Empathy mapping is a handy tool that helps to create a draft understanding of the customer and share it with the team. A buyer persona is a more detailed profile you give the staff. 

2. Identify Your Client's Pain

To create a relevant product design in insurance, you must first investigate the market with empathy for the customer. 

Claims management is one of the distinctive pains of claims management. Clients would like to spend less time handling their insurance issues. Internal workflow automation combined with digital tools to monitor personal data would do the job. 

Another standard industry problem is the complicated buying and renewal process. Insurance companies have the practice of quizzing small businesses with kilometer-long surveys and endless underwriting questions. Therefore, a streamlined application process would improve the client’s satisfaction. 

Haven Life is a great example of life insurance product design. The company reduced the application processing time from 1 week to 20 minutes with the online questionnaire on their website.   

3. Suggest a Solution

When you have defined a customer's pain, it becomes a starting point for your insurance product design. The improved product provides new options exactly where needed, and solutions perfectly match the client's expectations. 

Let us image an upgraded insurance product supporting home construction projects.

In addition to classical features, it might offer new benefits such as:

• Online calculator for the personalized insurance package, where clients can estimate fees and decide whether add equipment breakdown, service line, and contractors umbrella to the coverage or not
• Customized insurance pricing for IoT, when endpoint devices of the smart houses provide data for risk assessment and customers choose which items of their property they want to plug in, track, and protect. 
• Chatbot virtual agent that answers FAQs, explains terms and policies, and manages claims in the unfortunate event 24/7. 
• Automated paper fill-in help during the application
• Access to the database of high-quality service providers
• Animated explanation of the insurance cases and procedures

4. How Is Your Insurance Different From The Rest?

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When you think how to create an insurance product that will win the market, focus on communicating its value.

Your advertisement and landing page should answer the key questions:

• How does your offer differ?
• What are the benefits for the client?
• What are the proofs of reliability?
• In which situations does it help? 

The trick is to promote a new user experience in clear and easy words. Try to describe your product in one sentence. If you don’t like the result, watch the demo of CAKE - a digital workers' compensation platform from Pinnacol Assurance. These guys manage to explain insurance advantages in a few simple phrases. 

5. Make The Easiest Possible Test

It might be challenging to present your brainchild to the public. On the other hand, there is a great temptation to make a robust product, polish details, and come up with a solid proposal. 

But testing solution as early as possible prevents you from investing time and effort into a development that will find no customer. MVP or Minimal Viable Product will help you to understand what is wrong with your product and make corrections. 

Let us recall the classical story of Airbnb's launch to see how MVP works. In 2007 two product designers had a hunch that attendees of big tech conferences in San Francisco would prefer a simple bed and breakfast rather than an expensive hotel. So they made a simple landing page and promoted existing assets: air mattresses in their living room, free breakfast and WiFi, and like-minded neighbors. Three reservations in one evening proved that the proposal was viable. 

The main point is that you don’t need a powerful site or expensive technology to launch an MVP of an insurance product. It’s mainly about courage and understanding that it’s vital to test your gut feelings. 

Conclusion

If we wrap it up, the insurance product design should ensure a combination of good functionality with an appealing digital interface and smooth user experience.

We start with a target audience, emphasize reinsurer pain, propose solutions, and test it with MVP. Arounda team has tested this algorithm with all kinds of digital products: an NFT Marketplace, HR SaaS platform, FinTech, and meditation application, so we are confident to recommend you the formula.

If you are looking for an experienced product agency with a thrust for perfection, we are here for you!

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